This invention relates to wideband receiver systems and methods having a wideband receiver that is capable of receiving multiple radio frequency channels located in a broad radio frequency spectrum. In particular, the invention relates to wideband receiver systems that are capable of receiving multiple desired television channels that extend over multiple non-contiguous portions of the broad frequency spectrum and grouping them into a contiguous, or substantially-contiguous, frequency spectrum.
Receivers used to down-convert and selectively filter TV channels are referred to as tuners, and tuners designed to concurrently receive several TV channels are referred to as wideband tuners. Existing tuners for these applications down-convert a swath of channels to an intermediate frequency, which are then sent to a demodulator. Because the swath of channels is not contiguous, this swath includes the desired channels as well as undesired channels. The demodulator employs a high-speed data converter to capture this swath of desired and undesired channels in the digital domain and subsequently filters out the desired channels.
In general, television channels broadcasted over the air or over cable networks are distributed across a broad frequency spectrum. That is, the channel frequencies may not be adjacent to each other. In certain applications such as DVR and picture-in-picture, the receiver system may have to concurrently receive several desired channels that may or may not be contiguous. The wideband receiver requirement poses a trade-off to the system to limit either the dynamic range of the wideband tuner or reduce the bandwidth covered by the tuner so that fewer channels may be received and processed by the demodulator.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional wideband tuner 100. Tuner 100 may be a direct conversion tuner and includes a low noise amplifier LNA1 having an input terminal coupled to a radio frequency (RF) input signal 102 and an output terminal coupled to a mixer M1. The RF signal may include one or more television channels receiving from a cable network via an RF connector or wirelessly via an antenna. The RF input signal may include the VHF and UHF television channels in a terrestrial television broadcasting system or the CATV channels in cable networks. In order to receive all broadcasted channels present in the RF input signal, LNA1 must necessarily have a wide tuning range, high linearity, and low noise. Mixer M1 is coupled to a synthesizer S1 that can generate an oscillator frequency located around the center of the RF signal. Mixer M1 frequency down-converts the received RF input signal to a more convenient intermediate frequency (IF) band. Tuner 100 includes an amplifier V1 having a programmable gain for amplifying the IF signal, which is then band-pass filtered by a filter F1 before outputting to a demodulator.
In general, the RF signal includes multiple desired channels that are located in non-contiguous portions of a radio frequency spectrum. As shown in FIG. 1, the swath of channels 110 occupies a bandwidth BW1 120 at an RF center frequency frfc 130. Synthesizer S1 may be tuned to a frequency around the center frequency frfc 130 for mixing channels 110 to an intermediate frequency fifc 160, the frequency down-mixed channels 140 are amplified by amplifier V1 and then filtered by F1 to produce a swath of channels 170 centered around frequency fifc 160. In an exemplary application shown in FIG. 1, bandwidth BW1 contains 10 channels. In the case where channels are TV channels that are spaced at either 6 MHz or 8 MHz in most parts of the world, bandwidth BW1 120 would span from 60-80 MHz, i.e., the down-converted bandwidth at the intermediate frequency would require a bandwidth equal to at least BW1, or at least 80 MHz when such architecture is used. It is noted that in other applications where the desired RF channels are located in the low band such as channels numbers 2 to 6 (VHF in the terrestrial TV broadcast or CATV) and in the high band such as channels numbers 14 to 83 of the UHF TV broadcast or channel numbers 63-158 of the CATV's ultra band, the bandwidth BW1 can be 800 MHz or higher. This wide bandwidth of 800 MHz would require a very expensive digital processing circuitry such as very high-speed analog to digital conversion and high-speed processor in the demodulator.
It is desirable to have wideband receiver systems that can increase the dynamic range without requiring expensive data conversion, filtering and channel selection at the demodulator.